In 1880, Lafayette College English professor Francis A. March suggested to the National Educational Association (NEA) that one reform would save American schools $15 million per year.Footnote 1 Referring to the same reform in 1893, director of the United States Geological Survey John Wesley Powell added, “The average shortening of the time required to gain” elementary-level “knowledge would be very considerable; teachers say it would shorten the time two years.”Footnote 2 In 1906, newspapers throughout the country published New York school superintendent Edward B. Shallow's testimony that by eliminating two years the reform would save his district $42 million in eight years and possibly save families “500,000 years of earning power.”Footnote 3 As late as 1918, Joseph V. Collins of the State Normal School in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, argued that failure to institute this reform held American children two years behind German children, giving Germany “an enormous economic advantage.”Footnote 4 The reform these advocates valued so highly was the “simplification” of spelling. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reformers advocated—unsuccessfully, for the most part—the removal of superfluous letters from words, varying degrees of phonetic spelling, and, occasionally, even a modified alphabet. “Paying teachers for addling our children with bad spelling” and “trying to teach the child an illogical spelling,” according to March and Shallow, respectively, wasted too much money and time.Footnote 5
Saving money and time as March, Powell, Shallow, and Collins advocated conforms to historical accounts of Progressive Era developments in education, specifically efforts to create the “one best system” and the rise of the “cult of efficiency.” Yet David Tyack and Raymond Callahan do not mention the movement in their analyses of the bureaucratization and attempted Taylorization of public school systems during this period.Footnote 6 Within the historiography of education, Edgar B. Wesley's twelve-page chapter entitled “The Simplified-Spelling Movement” in his 1957 history of the NEA stood for more than half a century as the only treatment of simplified spelling. Wesley provided a blow-by-blow account of discussions within the NEA but little analysis; the chapter tells an entertaining story of a quirky reform effort that ultimately had little effect on the NEA or the schools.Footnote 7
While simplified spelling has remained largely outside the purview of historical treatments of the efficiency movement, Jonathan Zimmerman demonstrated in a 2010 article that arguments for spelling reform epitomized the gospel of efficiency. “Simplifiers” argued that spelling, like other areas of human endeavor, was in a constant state of change and thus in need of regulation by experts who would determine the most logical and concise form for each word. Zimmerman also explained that, like other progressive reformers, advocates of simplified spelling sought to enact widespread change by beginning with children in the schools. He acknowledged educators’ involvement in the movement and arguments that reformed spelling would make schools more efficient. However, these were not his main concerns as he disputed historians’ assumptions of widespread popularity of “the efficiency mantra” with the argument that opposition to simplified spelling was based on “the rejection of efficiency itself.” The few other scholarly references to spelling reform also pay little attention to educators.Footnote 8
But educators’ involvement in Progressive Era spelling-reform efforts deserves a closer look. Much of the advocacy for and debate over spelling reform took place in meetings of the NEA and individual state teachers' associations (STAs) as well as in education journals and reports of the US Bureau of Education. Utilizing these publications, meeting minutes, and the papers of key players, this essay examines the roles that the education establishment—the NEA, STAs, high-level school administrators, and prominent normal-school presidents—as well as classroom teachers played in spelling reform. Filling this gap in Zimmerman's account not only adds to our understanding of the simplified spelling movement and why it failed, but it challenges reigning accounts of the dynamics of the educational efficiency movement and the influence of teachers in shaping its impact in education.
Recent historians of education have increasingly challenged the assumption of Tyack and other historians that “administrative” and “pedagogical” progressivism in education were dichotomous.Footnote 9 Curriculum historians especially have assailed historiographical assumptions that social efficiency represented only the administrative-progressive extreme of using scientific-management techniques to design curricula that sorted students according to projections of their future vocations.Footnote 10 Examining simplified spelling furthers these historians’ arguments that Progressive Era theories of curricular efficiency incorporated social justice as much as social control. In addition, examining this movement advances challenges to the administrative-pedagogical dichotomy with evidence that efficiency played a role in child-centered arguments about the curriculum at the national and state levels. Without acknowledging any potential ideological contradiction, educators’ rationales for spelling reform smoothly infused egalitarianism into administrative progressivism and efficiency into pedagogical progressivism.
Finally, this essay analyzes the opposition to, and the ultimate failure of, the spelling reform movement in the public education sector, explaining that schoolteachers were less supportive of this reform than the establishment suggested. While most scholarship on Progressive Era teachers emphasizes that the rise of efficiency and administrative control in the schools robbed teachers of individual agency in the workplace, some historians suggest that teachers did occasionally find ways to work around onerous administrative demands.Footnote 11 When it came to simplified spelling, they forestalled new requirements by simply not supporting the establishment's call for change, demonstrating a subtle form of agency that few historians have acknowledged. In addition to teachers’ quiet resistance, a few education leaders expressed vehement opposition to spelling reform, while others increasingly tempered their advocacy. To a certain extent, these developments confirm Zimmerman's contention that antimodern opposition to efficiency was widespread. But antimodern objections were only a small thread in discussions of spelling reform in the public education sector. Teachers and, increasingly, leaders withheld or withdrew their support mainly due to an overriding fear of public scrutiny. This vulnerability to public opinion—a central yet now largely overlooked tenet of Callahan's account of the efficiency movementFootnote 12 —ultimately eroded educators’ support for spelling reform. The demise of simplified spelling within the public education sector, along with education leaders’ egalitarian arguments in its favor and their role in the wider movement for spelling reform, illustrate complexity in the public education establishment's relationship with efficiency as well as the establishment's ultimate susceptibility to teacher resistance and public censure.
The Public Education Establishment's Role in Sustaining the Spelling Reform Movement
One of the many groups that met in Philadelphia during the 1876 Centennial Exposition was the International Convention for the Amendment of English Orthography, a gathering of admirers of earlier spelling reform efforts by Benjamin Franklin and Noah Webster, sponsored by the American Philological Association. Out of this convention grew the Spelling Reform Association (SRA, sometimes spelled “Speling Reform Asoshiashun”), which endorsed a list of amended spellings and, according to active member Francis March, worked to “produce and concentrate dissatisfaction with the old spelling.” The SRA met regularly and sponsored publications in its effort to encourage editors, corporations, and other institutions to use shorter, more phonetic spelling. Officers in the early years included March and librarian Melvil Dewey, who simplified his last name to “Dui” for a short time and also campaigned for the adoption of the metric system while devising his system of book classification. In 1880, the SRA introduced a bill in Congress allowing reformed spelling in government documents and the District of Columbia's schools. The bill failed, but the association was successful in spreading the word about its cause. By the late nineteenth century, according to author Bill Bryson, “It seemed as if every eminent person on both sides of the Atlantic—including Darwin, Tennyson, Arthur Conan Doyle, James H. H. Murray (the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary), and of course Twain—was pushing for spelling reform. It is hard to say which is more remarkable, the number of influential people who became interested in spelling reform or the little effect they had on it.”Footnote 13 Some of these influential—if slightly less eminent—supporters of reform were leaders of American public education. Their organizations and publications provided such significant forums for discussion and structures for action on spelling reform from the 1870s into the twentieth century that the history of the movement is incomplete without them. Tracing the trajectory of simplified spelling within the education sector extends historians’ research on spelling reform by revealing the public education establishment's role in sustaining the movement. Just as the story of this ultimately unsuccessful movement has meaning for the larger history of Progressive Era efficiency, the education establishment's role in spelling reform underscores how integral education leaders were in the wider history of Progressive Era reform and, in turn, the subtle power of teachers and public scrutiny to influence the establishment.
An active participant in the Philadelphia spelling amendment convention was William Torrey Harris, one of the most influential and eminent leaders in public education. Hegelian philosopher, superintendent of schools in St. Louis (1869–1880), immediate past president of the NEA (1875), and future US Commissioner of Education (1889–1906), Harris was at the pinnacle of the public education establishment in 1876. He also had, in the interest of efficiency in writing, taught and continued to use “phonography” (shorthand) for two decades, introduced and worked to disseminate a “phonetic system” of teaching reading in St. Louis schools for a decade, and addressed the Missouri Teachers’ Association in 1858 on “some of the reasons for a change of our orthography and the adoption of a simpler one based on Phonetic Laws.” Harris was a bridge between the SRA—where he served as a vice president in the late 1870s and early 1880s—and the NEA.Footnote 14
The latter organization, which had begun as the National Teachers’ Association in 1857, was, according to historians David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, the “national center of influence in American education” by the 1870s. Despite its original name, the NEA for its first half century was primarily a professional organization for city and state superintendents, normal-school principals and faculty members, and college leaders and faculty interested in educational issues. Ties between the NEA and the SRA were so tight that the SRA met as a department of the NEA in 1879, 1880, and 1881; in essence, the nation's most prominent education association housed the spelling reform movement. The SRA department's program—transcriptions of which appeared in the published proceedings of the NEA in a modified script utilizing phonetic symbols—included lengthy updates on the state of the movement in the United States and Great Britain and discussions of how to overcome objections to the reform. At the 1880 department meeting, SRA president March endorsed Fonetic Teacher, a journal published in St. Louis by fellow SRA officer T. R. Vickroy, and an Oberlin professor spoke on the “duti” of colleges to advance spelling reform. At the 1881 meeting, Harris presided in March's absence, and the SRA elected additional vice presidents, including Columbia University president F. A. P. Barnard, Iowa State Normal School principal J. C. Gilchrist, former Chicago school superintendent W. H. Wells, and Nebraska state superintendent of public instruction W. W. W. Jones. Outside the SRA department, March, Vickroy, and others regularly addressed the summer NEA general meetings as well as the winter Department of Superintendence meetings, and these speeches on spelling reform often aroused lengthy discussions. The general NEA Proceedings also printed papers in modified spelling if their authors so requested. In his “Opening Adres” for the SRA department in 1881, March reported that the previous year's proceedings had contained twelve papers in “amended speling.” Those papers included “Text-Buks and their Usez” by Harris, demonstrating the commitment of NEA leadership to efficiency in spelling.Footnote 15
Discussions of spelling reform continued in state-level affiliates of the NEA, which were more welcoming of classroom teachers but generally mirrored the national organization in programming and leadership. At the December 1876 meeting of the Iowa STA, a superintendent of schools read a paper entitled “The Spelling Reform,” and ten years later another superintendent argued in “Our Mother Tongue” that change would come through a process of natural evolution rather than the actions of “would-be doctors of language” in spelling reform associations.Footnote 16 Meanwhile, the 1877 meeting of the New York STA and the 1878, 1883, and 1894 meetings of the Wisconsin STA included papers on spelling reform by professors and a normal-school president.Footnote 17 Spelling reform zealot E. O. Vaile traveled to the December 1878 meeting of the Michigan STA in Lansing to update members on the progress of reform and to encourage them to pass a resolution calling on the US Congress and their own state legislature to “look into the matter.” In the discussion that followed, two principals, three superintendents, a college president, and a University of Michigan professor considered the issue from many angles—apparently turning their colleagues against Vaile's proposal, because the Michigan STA did not pass the resolution. In Michigan and beyond, STAs served as venues for in-depth discussions of reform.Footnote 18
Like the NEA, STAs usually printed their proceedings, which exposed more educators to issues, including spelling reform. Some STAs also printed journals. Especially long running was The Iowa Normal Monthly, which billed itself as “the official journal” of the State Department of Education and the STA. During the three decades following its first issue in 1877, this journal published more than two dozen articles or editorials on the movement. In between articles on everything from ventilation in school buildings to teaching methods appeared pieces opposing or favoring spelling reform. An 1885 article on spelling books called spelling reform “a remedy worse than the disease,” but a short blurb in 1888 quoted March's argument that the process of learning traditional spelling was “stupefying and perverting.”Footnote 19 US Commissioner of Education John Eaton requested that March submit a report on spelling reform, which the Bureau of Education published in 1881.Footnote 20 Twelve years later, the Bureau published an expanded version of The Spelling Reform, with a supportive foreword by Commissioner Harris.Footnote 21 The School Review discussed these Bureau of Education reports, and articles on amended spelling also appeared in journals such as Educational Review and The Educational Weekly. Published in Chicago from 1877 through 1881, the latter journal printed a few dozen pieces on spelling reform, including a three-part series by Vaile in the summer and fall of 1877 and commentary in a fairly regular “Spelling Reform Department” during the winter of 1877–1878 by O. C. Blackmer, an educational publisher and head of a local branch of the SRA.Footnote 22 By the 1890s, Vaile was publishing an education journal in Oak Park, Illinois; between 1899 and 1903, in addition to printing sample lessons and articles on a range of educational issues, The Intelligence: A Journal of Education regularly updated its readers on “Progress in Spelling Reform” and what they could do to help, often using amended words such as thru and altho.Footnote 23 The Intelligence and other education publications thus stoked the spelling reform movement.
In addition to providing forums for dialogue, the organizations and publications of the public education establishment also sustained the movement by taking action, although it tended to be limited. The NEA Proceedings printed words with amended spellings—if an author so requested. Vaile's The Intelligence used more reformed spellings than most journals, while The Iowa Normal Monthly did not use any simplified words beyond occasionally substituting program for programme. After discussing spelling reform, some STAs passed resolutions in its favor and/or created committees to investigate further action.Footnote 24 The Iowa STA appointed a committee at its 1876 meeting and, at its 1878 meeting, passed a resolution “that we heartily approve the action of the Philological Association in asking of Congress a commission to examine into the desirability of reform in English spelling.”Footnote 25 March reported to the SRA at the 1879 NEA meeting that, in addition to Iowa's STA, the associations in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Missouri had recently passed resolutions. (He also claimed that the Michigan STA passed a resolution, but the records of that association suggest that Vaile was not successful there.) STA committees and resolutions on spelling reform continued off and on into the 1900s. At its 1886 meeting, the Iowa STA appointed a committee of three “gentlemen”—two college professors and a superintendent—and adopted a motion that it was “the sense of the Association that tho spells though.”Footnote 26 The Committee on Spelling Reform reported back to the Iowa STA at its 1887 and 1888 meetings, and the association voted in 1888 to “express special appreciation of the action taken by the Cedar Rapids Republican, in making trial of the thirteen amended spellings ‘out of respect for the State Teachers’ Association.’”Footnote 27 The Illinois STA in 1902 passed a resolution on spelling reform and appointed a new Committee on Amelioration of Our Spelling, chaired by Illinois State Normal University president David Felmley, that included Vaile, John Dewey, school superintendents, and normal school and university faculty.Footnote 28
By the 1890s, the NEA regularly created committees on spelling or alphabet reform that reported back to the larger membership. In February 1897, the Department of Superintendence appointed a committee, chaired by Harris, to “fix upon” specific simplified spellings for use in the NEA Proceedings. One year later, the department passed a resolution directing its secretary to use the following twelve “amended spellings”: “program (programme), tho (though), altho (although), thoro (through), thorofare (thoroughfare), thru (through), thruout (throughout), catalog (catalogue), prolog (prologue), decalog (decalogue), demagog (demagogue), pedagog (pedagogue).” In July 1898, the NEA Board of Directors ordered the use of the twelve words in all NEA publications.Footnote 29 Far less radical than the spelling adopted by Harris and others in earlier years, the NEA leadership's adoption of this list of twelve words would stand as one of the most significant actions on behalf of spelling reform in the United States. Not only did newspapers and non–education journals report on the twelve words, they invariably associated them with public education or—inaccurately—“teachers.”Footnote 30 One writer in the Friends’ Intelligencer asked “whether the Intelligencer should not join the teachers in introducing and popularizing the more truthful spelling of a few words they have selected.”Footnote 31 Although the NEA Board of Directors amended the 1898 resolution the following year to allow an exception “when the author of a paper formally requests the use of the standard spellings therein,”Footnote 32 the passage of this resolution was one of the few successes of the spelling reform movement, and it was an achievement of the public education establishment. During the following decade, however, the NEA's work for spelling reform would be subsumed by events outside the education sector that brought unprecedented attention to the cause.
The spelling reform movement energized and realigned itself in 1906, when industrial philanthropist Andrew Carnegie and President Theodore Roosevelt publicly signed on. Carnegie had begun to pump money into the SRA, which he convinced to rename itself the Simplified Spelling Board (SSB) in order to remove the potential controversy of “Reform.” Carnegie donated a total of $250,000 over a dozen years, which supported an SSB office in New York—led by Dewey and Columbia University professor Brander Matthews—and publicity for the cause, mainly through a series of circulars and bulletins. Issued in March 1906, the first circular listed the SSB's twenty-eight members, who included Dewey, Matthews, March, Supreme Court Justice David J. Brewer, Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler, writer Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain), activist and author Thomas Wentworth Higginson, publisher Henry Holt, and Harvard philosopher William James. The education establishment was well represented on the SSB, as the membership list also included Education Commissioner Harris, education publishers Vaile and Blackmer, and president of the Iowa State Normal School Homer H. Seerley.Footnote 33
The first SSB circular also listed the simplified versions of three hundred common words and included an “addrest postal card,” which the receiver was invited to sign and return as a pledge to “use the simpler form [of spelling] as far as may be practically possible.” The list of three hundred words encapsulated many spelling changes that were already fairly common, such as removing the u from words ending in -our and changing the noun ending -re to -er. Other changes included removing phonetically unnecessary letters from words (making although into altho, catalogue into catalog, and thoroughly into thoroly, for example) and substituting more phonetically accurate letters within words (fantom rather than phantom, materialize rather than materialise, and rime rather than rhyme, for example). No fewer than seventy-three words on the list were past-tense verbs in which -ed became -t (such as dropt, lookt, and strest). Soon, thousands signed the pledge, a few newspapers adopted the three hundred words, and President Roosevelt began to use simplified spelling. In August, he ordered the Public Printer to use the three hundred words in all federal documents.Footnote 34 The spelling reform movement had, from the beginning, aroused objections and some ridicule, but nothing compared to the outpouring of what journalist Mark Sullivan called “parodying, punning, disputation and other forms of commotion” in the public and the popular press in the fall of 1906.Footnote 35 One newspaper headline read, “Rozevult Aksepts Latest Spelling Rules … Here Are Sum of the Wurds Afekted.”Footnote 36 Congress vociferously debated and denounced the president's order until he finally withdrew it in December 1906. Zimmerman points out that, although most accounts of simplified spelling suggest that the criticism in 1906 killed the movement, the SSB remained active well into the 1910s, issuing new lists of amended words in 1908 and 1909 and publishing circulars through 1913. (Its funding dried up following Carnegie's death in 1919.) Ties between the public education establishment and the spelling reform movement also remained strong into the 1910s, while their relationship shifted.Footnote 37
With the arrival of the new century, a pattern emerged in which the NEA occasionally discussed spelling or alphabet reform, but backed away from taking action. In 1901, the Department of Superintendence voted to table, or suspend consideration of, two motions related to spelling reform. Two years later, the department appointed two committees, one to look into promoting simplified spelling and the other to consider “a universal system of key notation for indicating pronunciation … or at least a simple, practical phonetic alphabet as the universal basis of such a system.”Footnote 38 For the next nine years, chairman Vaile of the latter committee worked to teach the NEA about his “key alphabet.” Most of Vaile's motions were tabled, and those he managed to have passed were soon rescinded. The Committee on the Simplification of Spelling continued for a few years, polling the NEA members and advocating “discreet, systematic, quiet, and thoroughgoing effort.” Although its work was to no avail, the NEA committee helped to keep the movement alive. In 1907, a “Declaration of Principles” proposed at the NEA meeting in Los Angeles included twenty points related to a variety of issues. Point 14 stated, “The National Educational Association approves the efforts of the Simplified Spelling Board … and the Association hereby approves the simpler forms contained in the list of three hundred words … and directs that these simpler forms be used in the publications of the Association.” Discussion of the twenty points focused on number 14, reflecting the continuing prominence of spelling reform within the education establishment. After impassioned pleas by Vaile and others, the assembly approved the entire declaration. The secretary, however, continued to use only the twelve “NEA spellings” amid doubts about the constitutionality of point 14.Footnote 39 Shortly before the next meeting, Seerley wrote to the SSB secretary, “I think the day is past for securing actions” on simplified spelling at the “assembly of the N. E. A.”Footnote 40 Indeed, at the 1908 meeting in Cleveland, a resolution that the secretary “be directed” to use the SSB's three hundred words in NEA publications was “laid on the table.”Footnote 41 On the table it and other simplified-spelling discussions and resolutions would remain, as spelling reform for the most part ceased to be a concern of the association.
The public education establishment did not abandon spelling reform, however, as consideration of simplified spelling and occasional action on its behalf did continue in the STAs and education publications. Several STAs discussed simplified spelling, and the associations in Washington and Idaho passed resolutions favoring reform. The Illinois STA's committee on spelling reform continued through the mid-1910s, and the Association's Journal of Proceedings reported on the 1911, 1912, and 1913 meetings with simplified word forms. The Iowa STA did not discuss simplified spelling after 1906, but The Iowa Normal Monthly continued the level of coverage it had provided in earlier decades. Other education journals sustained the discussion through the 1910s as well; The American School Board Journal reported on Carnegie's contributions to the SSB and carried several articles on simplified spelling and the key alphabet.Footnote 42
Although the NEA as an organization stepped aside, prominent members of the education establishment remained highly involved in the simplified-spelling movement. Instead of carving out a place for the SSB within the NEA, they represented education within the SSB. Elected as one of several SSB vice presidents in 1911, Seerley was a fixture at SSB meetings in New York City, where he enjoyed the company of New York Superintendents William H. Maxwell and Julia Richman, US Education Commissioner Elmer E. Brown, and an increasing number of normal-school presidents. In 1909, the Board appointed Seerley, Felmley, and President Charles McKenny of the state normal school in Milwaukee to lead the SSB Committee on Normal Schools, which bridged the SSB and the NEA Normal Department. As the earlier generation of spelling reformers died—the Simplified Spelling Bulletin included obituaries for Brewer, Clemens, and James just in 1910—several heads of normal schools filled open positions on the Board. When The American School Board Journal noted the SSB's announcement of member elections in 1911, it observed, “It is remarkable that each of the seven new men is a schoolman engaged in the education of teachers.”Footnote 43 The Simplified Spelling Bulletin included a regular column entitled “In the Educational World,” which reported on developments and symbolized the close relationship between educational leaders and the SSB.Footnote 44 From Harris in the SRA through Seerley in the SSB, the public education establishment was integral to sustaining the movement for spelling reform. Education leaders advocated efficiency in spelling as they adopted a wide range of efficiency measures in public schools during the Progressive Era.
Arguments for Spelling Reform and Progressivism in Education
The Simplified Spelling Bulletin reported, tongue-in-cheek, in 1910, “We are glad to see that the spelling bee is being revived. … The spelling bee conducted in connection with the National Education Association at Cleveland in June, 1908, attracted attention thruout the country. … Everything was conducted in the good old medieval way.”Footnote 45 Calling the NEA spelling bee “medieval” cast it as contrary to modern progress, suggesting that memorizing illogical spellings and reciting them wasted students’ time and detracted from real learning. From the mid-1870s through the 1910s, supporters of spelling reform argued consistently that it would increase the efficiency of the school system. In his banquet speech at the 1911 meeting of the SSB, Superintendent Maxwell argued that reformed spelling would save “time and labor in lerning to read and write,” but also added, “it will turn out our children better equipt with that power of reasoning understandingly which is necessary to every citizen” and “assist our children in lerning to think and so to be self-reliant … it will make of each child a more efficient human being.”Footnote 46
Such rhetoric clearly reflected the public education establishment's reverence for efficiency; it is not surprising that educators’ arguments for spelling reform often included elements of “technical utility,” the ideology that Tyack and Hansot demonstrate guided mechanization and bureaucratization throughout American society, including in education.Footnote 47 Yet in considering thinking skills and efficiency on the individual level, Maxwell veered away from a central tenet of Tyack's later conceptualization of “administrative progressivism” in education: that the ideology of social efficiency equaled social control, mainly through differentiated curricula to prepare children from different backgrounds for different futures.Footnote 48 This variant of social efficiency was not present in discussions of simplified spelling. Curriculum historians have demonstrated that Progressive Era educators employed a broader definition of social efficiency that incorporated democratic living and social justice; “social efficiency as social service remained a powerful ideal,” explains J. Wesley Null.Footnote 49 Unlike social control, the social justice side of social efficiency was prominent in educators’ advocacy of spelling reform in the interest of serving all students. Examining the rhetoric of many different leaders on this particular reform—rather than focusing on the ideas of individual theorists on various reforms as curriculum historians tend to do—crystalizes the idea of egalitarian social efficiency. Maxwell's conceptualization of individual efficiency also folded the administrative-progressive ideal of efficiency into the pedagogical-progressive ideal of child-centeredness. Historian David Gamson argues that “at the local level, educators combined [administrative- and pedagogical-progressive] reforms that in retrospect appear irreconcilable” to create “district progressivism.”Footnote 50 Examining discussions of simplified spelling reveals that public education leaders at the national and state levels also did not recognize a dichotomy in approaches to reform. While they subscribed to the ideology of technical utility, they also viewed social efficiency through an egalitarian lens and argued that efficiency in spelling would enhance child-centered approaches to education.Footnote 51
Tyack links the bureaucratization of urban school systems in the second half of the nineteenth century to “new technology and new forms of organization” appearing in the business sector and the larger society, developments through which preindustrial culture would progress toward modernity. He and Hansot explain further that school leaders during the Progressive Era adopted the ideology historian John Higham labels “‘technical utility,’ by which he means ‘a reordering of human relations by rational procedures designed to maximize efficiency,’” incorporated in the factory system and exemplified in “the image of the machine.”Footnote 52 This ideology of technical utility suffused educational leaders’ discussions of spelling reform, as when March declared in his opening address at the SRA department of the 1880 NEA meeting that written words “ar inventions” that “ar to be improved like all labor-saving machinery.”Footnote 53 Reformers consistently used machine imagery to describe the difference between traditional and simplified spelling: a speaker at the 1876 NEA meeting suggested that unreformed spelling was “an instrument far clumsier than the wooden plow and the crossbow in the age of steam and electricity,” and an 1877 article in The Educational Weekly declared spelling reform “worthy of the nineteenth century … as the locomotive compares with the lumbering baggage wagon, or the telegraph with the swift post-horse.”Footnote 54 According to its proponents, simplified spelling reflected as well as furthered human progress, just like improvements in industry. The Oberlin professor who spoke at the 1880 SRA/NEA meeting noted that progress “meanz constant reform.” He then asked his audience to “Compar for a moment speling-reform with other great contemporari reformz,” including the abolition of slavery.Footnote 55 Spelling reform would help civilization to advance not only at home but abroad as well; its proponents explained how simplified spelling could serve as a tool of American manifest destiny and English colonization. A dictionary editor said at the 1902 NEA meeting, “These great empires speak English. Already the uttermost isles of the sea have heard from either empire the strenuous accents of English, sacred and profane; and the heathen are made glad. But will they be glad when they see how you spell?”Footnote 56 NEA speakers at different times claimed that spelling reform would help make English “the international language of the world,” spreading peace and harmony. In keeping with technical utility, educators envisioned reformed spelling contributing to “a reordering of human relations by rational procedures” on nothing short of a global scale.Footnote 57
When educators’ discussions moved beyond abstract promises of progress, maximizing efficiency in the spirit of technical utility remained central to more concrete reasons to support spelling reform. Focusing on the printing industry and, especially, on the education system, these arguments were consistent from the 1870s into the 1910s. A newspaper editor told the SRA department of the NEA in 1879, “Of the several fases of the practical aspect of this question as applied to journalism, the saving of time, labor and money is of the first importance.” Simplified spelling would help in all three areas because unreformed words contained enough “superfluous letters … to fil ful five issues a year” of his paper.Footnote 58 At the 1891 NEA meeting, education publisher Vickroy announced, “Pure fonetic spelling would shorten the written form of our language a little over twenty-two per cent. on average,” making the work of “the copyist” and “the compositor” far more efficient and less costly.Footnote 59 Four years later, in The Iowa Normal Monthly, a faculty member at Iowa State Normal School lamented the “waste [of] countless resources of ink and time and energy in writing silent letters that only serve to hide correct pronunciation.”Footnote 60
When spelling reformers focused on the education system's resources, their primary and invariable concerns were money and time. Many speeches and articles echoed March, Powell, Shallow, and Collins in arguing that simplified spelling would save tremendous amounts of both. At the Michigan STA meeting, Vaile highlighted the “money that would be saved in education, as teachers would spend less time on reading and spelling,” with specific examples and dollar amounts.Footnote 61 March presented further evidence in his 1893 Bureau of Education Circular, reporting that a committee had testified before the Pennsylvania legislature “that the irregular spelling of the English language … involvs an expense of many millions of dollars annually for teachers, and that this is an obstacle in many other ways to the progress of education.”Footnote 62 Saving time in education seemed to be even more important than saving money, as speech after speech and article after article stated that spelling reform would remove two years from the time necessary to complete elementary-level studies. In “A Plea for Simplified Spelling” at the 1902 meeting of the Illinois STA, the Springfield superintendent focused on “economy of time in learning to spell,” arguing that phonetic spelling would allow children to “learn to spell and pronounce correctly every word in the English language in less than two years.” Dictionary editor I. K. Funk argued in The Intelligence that Harris “tells us that the placing of our spelling on the rational basis … ‘would save two years of the school life of American children.’”Footnote 63 Alexander Melville Bell in 1893 advocated using a reformed phonetic alphabet to teach reading, saying that it would save “not less than fifty per cent. in the time required to make good readers.” Two decades later, an article in The School Review advocated a universal phonetic “world alphabet” with which children could learn to “read with tolerable fluency” in only a month, and stated that Bell's son, Alexander Graham Bell, was “walking proof, having been taught by that method.”Footnote 64
While arguments that spelling reform would save money and time reflected the ideology of technical utility, educators’ other reasons for change invoked social justice; to spelling reformers, social efficiency meant easing access to the English language for all. Presiding over the 1881 meeting of the SRA at the NEA assembly, Harris likely nodded in agreement as one speaker appealed for “the relief ov the mases ov the pepl from the labor ov lerning our speling.”Footnote 65 The only differentiation among groups that Vaile made in an early plea for reform was between children and adults: “Children must not be required to write in the old method, and adults need not be expected to write in the new.”Footnote 66 That Harris would support spelling reform in the name of efficiency as well as an egalitarian curriculum is hardly surprising considering his reputation for valuing order and a common culture while opposing vocational education. What is remarkable is how thoroughly his conception permeated spelling reform within the public education establishment through the 1910s.Footnote 67
Supporters of simplified spelling never argued that reformed spelling was only for particular types or groups of students, as social efficiency for social control would suggest. They spoke regularly about their concerns for American and British colonial subjects and the special needs of African Americans, Native Americans, and, especially, immigrants to the United States without suggesting that spelling or spelling instruction should be different for them. Vaile's references to “the difficulties which foreigners encounter in trying to acquire our language” were typical. “The education of the freedmen and the Indians in our own country,” he also stated, “is hindered by our eccentric spelling more than any other cause.”Footnote 68 Writing to presidents of other normal schools in 1909 to promote simplified spelling, Seerley, Felmley, and McKenny explained, “We are interested specially in the educational side because of the work in the public schools and in the teaching of the strange populations that annually come to the United States, and for that reason should welcome any simplifications of the English language that can be rightly secured.”Footnote 69 Although a bit paternalistic, spelling reformers were egalitarian in that they sought the same reform for “strange populations” and the mainstream. As Maxwell summed up in his SSB banquet speech, simplified spelling was “For the Welfare of All.”Footnote 70 Seerley went so far as to hint that simplified spelling might alleviate some class differences, stating, “The masses are always to be given consideration and are to be preferred to the classes—even when the classes are produced by anomalies of spelling alone.”Footnote 71 These arguments for spelling reform encapsulated an egalitarian view of social efficiency.
Just as spelling reformers in the education establishment brought an element of social justice to social efficiency, they also argued that, in the case of simplified spelling, efficiency could enhance child-centered pedagogical approaches. Seemingly without any sense of ideological ambivalence, they regularly coupled their arguments that simplified spelling would save money and time with child-centered, even romantic, pleas to release children from the undue burden of learning traditional English spelling. Vaile wrote that teaching the traditional “false and inconsistent” spelling did not allow for “utilizing natural forces, and proceeding according to the current of the child's common sense.”Footnote 72 Speaking before the general NEA meeting, March linked spelling reform to “the new spirit of love and progress [that] animates the teacher today,” and one of the arguments Bell made in favor of a reformed phonetic alphabet was “Justice to the Young.”Footnote 73 Francis W. Parker, a prominent proponent of child-centered pedagogy, stood alongside efficiency-minded leaders to support simplified spelling. Parker told the NEA Department of Superintendence in 1901, “The children should learn to read and express thought without the handicap of the abomination of desolation of our unphonetic language. The manner of spelling words is simply fashion. … Think of the waste of time! Ask the teachers and they say: ‘We must spend time on spelling which we should devote to more important things. …’ Give the children release from bondage!”Footnote 74 Saving time and money did not necessarily mean releasing children from bondage, but advocates argued that simplified spelling would accomplish both goals.Footnote 75
Educators’ plans for time saved through spelling reform suggest a form of pedagogical-progressive efficiency, as they aimed to use the extra time to enhance child-centered and humanist aspects of the curriculum. Vickroy's plea in 1881 for more time stressed both efficiency and the romantic sense that children had a natural sense of what to do with that time:
I heard Dr. Harris say that the necessity of consulting the dictionary for the spelling and pronunciation of words had cost him five years of precious time. And who of us would not give Dr. Harris back those wasted years? But, alas! we cannot. The best we can do is to spare these years to the rising young men and women of the land, that they may have time to harvest the fields of knowledge ripening all around them.Footnote 76
Ten years later, Vickroy was a member of an NEA spelling reform committee that listed as the first advantage of saving time, “Our youth could enter the higher institutions two years earlier. This addition of two years’ culture without increased expenditure of time and money would raise the common standard of intelligence wonderfully!”Footnote 77 Harris, Parker, and others named science, history, and literature as the subjects to which students would be able to devote two additional years. In the early 1910s The School Review’s “world alphabet” article suggested that the additional time should be devoted to newer child-centered pursuits of “physical exercise in the sunlight … manual training” and “practical conduct lessons,” and that this “gift … would mark a veritable renaissance of education.”Footnote 78 When Seerley expressed concern for “the masses,” he said that he wanted them to receive education for a “serviceable and useful life,” one of the elements of which was intelligent voting. He, like Maxwell, argued that it was essential that children learn “to think for themselvs.”Footnote 79 Among the curricular rationales that reformers presented for simplified spelling were that it would foster critical thinking, create more space for the humanities, and release children from mindless drudgery.Footnote 80 These goals do not square easily with the aims of saving time and money, and yet advocates of spelling reform presented both efficiency-oriented and child-centered arguments. Just as promotion of simplified spelling defied categorization, opposition to the reform did not adhere neatly to historians’ portrayals of Progressive Era teachers and school leaders.
The Roles of Teachers and Public Opinion in the Demise of Spelling Reform
If spelling reform appealed to such varied ideological streams within the public education establishment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then why was it not more successful? Why did the NEA table resolution after resolution on the subject and why did discussion of it within the NEA, STAs, and education journals peter out by the late 1910s? While the movement's leaders saw teachers as their torchbearers, the newspaper editor who spoke to the SRA at the 1879 NEA meeting argued that journalists should take the lead in reforming spelling because “the school teachers … are handicapped by precedent, in bondage to long-printed text-books, and at the mercy of the popular prejudice.”Footnote 81 Indeed, the historical record reveals that teachers did not support the movement as actively as leaders suggested they did or should. When historians have acknowledged teacher agency in the face of Progressive Era bureaucratization, they have focused mainly on organized action by teachers’ unions. Yet Kate Rousmaniere and Larry Cuban suggest that teachers found subtle ways aside from union activities to shape their work lives: Rousmaniere describes how city teachers in the 1920s accommodated, adapted, and resisted various administrative demands, and Cuban argues that behind closed classroom doors many teachers continued to follow traditional approaches, both to maintain order and to satisfy the public's, rather than administrators’, expectations.Footnote 82 In expressing opposition or, more commonly, simply ignoring spelling reform, teachers worked to forestall further administrator-directed change in their work; the case of simplified spelling illustrates a subtle form of teacher resistance to administrative direction. Straightforward opposition to efficiency, often based on antimodernism—which historian T. J. Jackson Lears argues was a “complex blend of accommodation and protest” that arose from “dissatisfaction with modern culture in all of its dimensions,” including “its cult of science and technical rationality”—was certainly present in teachers’ arguments against reform.Footnote 83 This sentiment, however, was not the overriding force shaping teachers’ responses to spelling reform, as it was the public's expectations, acknowledged by Cuban, that outweighed pressure from administrators to support spelling reform. In the words of the newspaper editor, “popular prejudice” played more of a role than “precedent” or “bondage” to the past.Footnote 84
While education leaders who opposed simplified spelling also invoked opposition to efficiency and antimodernism, such arguments were rare among members of the education establishment. Like teachers, however, the latter group increasingly expressed concern about public scrutiny in the area of spelling reform. In Education and the Cult of Efficiency, Callahan stresses that superintendents and other leaders in public education adopted scientific-management techniques due to “the extreme vulnerability of our schoolmen to public criticism and pressure.” While subsequent historians have cited widely his descriptions of the education establishment's embrace of efficiency, they have generally overlooked or dismissed Callahan's vulnerability thesis; Barbara Berman argued that “schoolmen were less ‘vulnerable’ than active participants and even beneficiaries of this modernization process.”Footnote 85 The vulnerability thesis, however, goes a long way toward explaining why spelling reform fell out of favor in the public education sector—with the important revision that consideration of vulnerability must focus on teachers as well as administrative leaders.Footnote 86 Opposition to efficiency, often fueled by antimodernism, undoubtedly helped to shape public pressure, but the pressure itself rather than its ideological underpinnings was the crucial factor. The public education establishment's ultimate rejection of spelling reform was less a renunciation of efficiency, as Zimmerman suggests, and more a concession to teacher resistance and a confirmation of the reason Callahan posits for the education leaders’ embrace of efficiency: vulnerability to public opinion.
One historian mentions that at the time Carnegie began supporting the SSB “much of the … impetus for reform had come from the nation's teachers,” and Zimmerman states that even after public outcry against Roosevelt's actions on simplified spelling, “teachers rallied to the cause.”Footnote 87 The historical record seems at first glance to support their claims, as many STAs passed resolutions supporting reform, and press coverage of the NEA's twelve words attributed them to “the teachers.” The NEA and STAs throughout this period, however, were organs of the public education establishment, not lowly schoolteachers. The leaders in these associations and education journals were far more likely to speak for and to teachers than to include their actual voices in discussions of spelling reform. Speaking on behalf of teachers, education publisher Vaile said, “From their sympathetic contact with childhood teachers feel more keenly than any others the evils of our present spelling, and so are the most natural and potent agents of spreding the gospel of spelling reform.”Footnote 88 Seerley assured the SSB “that it is only necessary to keep on spreding information in order to secure the adhesion of the teachers,” and March told the NEA assembly, “Our American teachers hav long workt at the problem of improving the methods of teaching reading” in the face of “an unteachable, whimsical mass of anomalies. … And so it is easy to see why teachers hav been, and will be, the main promoters, and the best hope of the Spelling Reform.”Footnote 89
After declaring teachers “the main promoters” of reform, March continued, “It may surely be hoped that they will do their full share towards winning the general assent.”Footnote 90 Indeed, he and other spelling reformers seemed to solicit teachers’ support more than provide evidence of it. After the Iowa STA passed resolutions in favor of spelling reform in the mid-1880s, an article in The Iowa Normal Monthly asked and answered the question, “Teachers, what next?” Specific instructions had a paternalistic tone: “Uze the spelling yourselvs … Publish the News. Write the nicely-trimed words in large letters on the blackboard. Hang them up in a frame. Let each child make a copy.”Footnote 91 The SSB sent thousands of unsolicited circulars and pamphlets to teachers throughout the country. One mailing included a copy of Maxwell's 1911 banquet speech and a letter emphasizing “the opportunity and the privilege that teachers, especially, enjoy to promote this movement.”Footnote 92 Seerley and Felmley regularly addressed their states’ teachers on simplified spelling and distributed SSB materials; the SSB secretary wrote to Felmley, “You do a practical service.”Footnote 93 Felmley also wrote to the alumni of Illinois State Normal University, “Are there any upon whom the task of leading in this reform, so mighty in its significance to generations yet unborn, rests as a higher and holier duty than upon the teachers of our nation?”Footnote 94 A similarly passionate speaker at an NEA meeting called on teachers to rise above public pressure and support simplified spelling: “Teachers, at any rate, must not fall down before the great god Majority. … Their duty is to improve their pupils, and especially their pupils’ minds. … The simplification of English is a present duty. It is a moral duty.”Footnote 95
Most SSB materials included pledge cards, and some teachers filled them out and sent them back. According to the Board, by 1909 nearly seven thousand “teachers, superintendents and college professors” had “signd the cards of agreement,” and in 1913, 452 (of 2,700) signers of a new set of cards were schoolteachers.Footnote 96 Such statistics and the reformers’ passion on behalf and in solicitation of teachers could create the impression that teachers were ardent supporters of spelling reform. There is little evidence, however, that schoolteachers took action beyond listening to the debates and occasionally signing pledge cards. It is possible that they voted in favor of resolutions supporting spelling reform and/or signed SSB pledge cards only in order to please their superiors, much as they met the new bureaucratic demands of administrative progressivism while continuing to teach in a traditional manner. In the rare instances when their voices were actually part of the conversation, a few teachers did express support. At the 1907 NEA meeting, in the discussion of the point in the “Declaration of Principles” supporting simplified spelling, a “Miss Shirley” said, “I am in favor of progress. … I, as a teacher, have worked on this old spelling many years. … Let us have something that is sensible.”Footnote 97 Four years later, a polytechnic teacher told the NEA Secondary Department that he had “induced twenty others” to join the movement for spelling reform.Footnote 98 Such vocal support for reform, however, was unusual among teachers.
Balancing out teachers who supported spelling reform, others pleaded passionately against it, openly resisting the agenda of the education establishment. Antimodernist opposition to efficiency was a clear thread in their objections, as evidenced in Mrs. T. F. M. Curry's 1879 article in The Iowa Normal Monthly. She wrote that when a professor “counsels teachers not only to adopt the new method themselves, but also to impress upon the minds of their pupils that … the whole system is wrong and ought to be changed, we say—‘Hands off! Better step out of the pedagogical ranks if you are unwilling to teach our noble English tongue, as it has come down to us, with all its wealth of associated literature.’” Natural evolution rather than forced reform, she argued, would preserve “the pleasure of tracing back words to their primitive roots, thus communing in thought with the ancient Greek, and Roman, and Teuton.”Footnote 99 Similar sentiment motivated a teacher attending the Missouri STA meeting in 1913. The Simplified Spelling Bulletin reported unsympathetically on the “teacher in the back of the assembly who awoke to the fact that the English language was in danger, and rusht to the defense. He leapt on a near-by table and protested with all his energy against ‘this thing,’ calling out that … our language should not be assassinated.”Footnote 100
The vast majority of schoolteachers did not exhibit either Mrs. Curry's antimodernist passion or Miss Shirley's faith in progress, and their refusals to take a stand were essentially votes against spelling reform as well as quiet expressions of resistance to administrator-directed change in their classrooms. Schoolteachers almost never appeared on membership lists of the various NEA and STA committees on spelling reform. Vaile claimed that he had “wanted the women teachers well represented,” but the spelling reform commission he proposed—unsuccessfully—to the Department of Superintendence in 1901 was made up of “university men,” school superintendents, other “prominent men,” and “one lady” (Chicago school leader Ella Flagg Young). Education publisher Blackmer wrote to Seerley in 1907, “I want to prove to teachers and to the general public that my way [simplified spelling] is the best way. … But teachers of the public are unbelieving.”Footnote 101 Reed College president William T. Foster, in the NEA's Secondary Department in 1911, remarked in a discussion of simplified spelling, “The teachers of the United States have not yet given sufficient evidence that they want simplified spelling.”Footnote 102 University of Illinois education dean Lotus D. Coffman raised the same issue in the journal of the Illinois STA in 1914 when he objected to a resolution the association passed three years earlier: “Whether the teachers of the state as a body actually desired the passage of this resolution and whether its passage has actually modified practice to any considerable extent, are facts of which I am not convinced.” He further explained, “The resolution which is now presumed to express the will of the 11,000 teachers belonging to the present organization received 109 votes. I believe that many of those who voted for it are now convinced of the impracticality of the movement.”Footnote 103 While Blackmer and Foster lamented teachers’ failure to actively support spelling reform, Coffman's numbers illustrated the severity of the situation.
Teachers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, like those who preceded and would follow them, were in a precarious position as they struggled to serve their students and to meet the expectations not only of administrators but also of their local communities. Although the vast majority of teachers who did not support spelling reform did not document the reasons why, evidence left by the education establishment suggests that concern about public censure weighed heavily on teachers as they evaluated proposals for simplified spelling; they understood that bearing the torch for an unpopular cause could seriously undermine their standing in the community. Even ardent spelling reformers acknowledged the power of public scrutiny in teachers’ lives. In the Michigan STA's 1878 discussion, one superintendent said that he supported spelling reform, but that to “at once begin teaching the reformed spelling … would undoubtedly cost a man [a teacher] his place.”Footnote 104 Vaile's The Intelligence acknowledged that reform was “a matter which as yet must be left to the school board” rather than to teachers, and Harris pointed out that reformers “certainly would not suppose that the teacher can introduce spelling reform into his school without the permission of his school committee.”Footnote 105 Seerley explained to the SSB that teachers “are compelled to teach civilization's practises and principles as they find them and as they are assigned by the expert and the scholar.”Footnote 106
Thus, while the public education establishment volunteered teachers’ service for the cause, some of its members also understood that public scrutiny and the precariousness of the teachers’ position restricted their actions. Teachers may have been willing to consider, or even may have been attracted to, the potential of simplified spelling to facilitate the teaching of spelling and reading, but hesitated to take a stand because of the public microscope under which they lived. Deference to “popular prejudice,” which played a greater role in teachers’ lack of outright support for spelling reform than antimodernist opposition to efficiency in general, shaped their quiet resistance to administrators’ expectations that they sign on to the cause of simplified spelling. Teachers understood that it was safer to sidestep the desires of school administrators than to oppose “the great god Majority.” The education establishment came increasingly to share their concern, eventually conceding to their resistance.
Like the Missouri teacher and Mrs. Curry, some members of the public education establishment vocally opposed simplified spelling with anti-efficiency arguments. In 1902, The Iowa Normal Monthly reprinted “Spelling Yelpers” by Superintendent J. M. Greenwood, first published in the Western School Journal. In the article, Greenwood railed against spelling reformers and argued that students must learn traditional spelling because it bequeaths a “treasure house of such inestimable value,” as “in words all the knowledge, wisdom, and institutional life of the human race are imbedded.”Footnote 107 Western School Journal editor John MacDonald spoke out regularly against spelling reform in the NEA and other settings. Printed in The Iowa Normal Monthly in 1905, his comment that appointing committees on simplified spelling was akin to investigating the proposition “that the course of the Gulf Stream be changed so as to bring the current into harmony with the complex demands of our modern civilization” reflected skepticism of progress, if not the “more profound” strain of antimodernism that Lears argues “attacked the hubris of … bureaucratic ‘rationality.’”Footnote 108 Still, profound or not, commentary along the lines of MacDonald's remained rare in the education establishment.
One of the most prominent education journals in the Progressive Era, The American School Board Journal—“A Periodical of School Administration”—celebrated many forms of school efficiency but was slow to cover simplified spelling and remained largely unenthusiastic about the reform. By the mid-1900s, it reported occasionally on developments and published a few promotional articles by Vaile. Other pieces, as well as jokes and cartoons, were decidedly critical of the reform, but lacked an anti-efficiency tone. For example, a page of jokes and amusing stories in the September 1906 issue included an exchange in which a boss pointed out “several misspelled words” and a stenographer replied, “I beg your pardon, sir. Those words are not misspelled—they are simplified.”Footnote 109 The cover of the next issue was a drawing of President Theodore Roosevelt at the head of a classroom of snickering children. Roosevelt held a book entitled Carnegie's Text Book on Spelling and pointed at five creatively spelled words on the blackboard, including “WILDKAT” and “NIFE.”Footnote 110 Several years later, a cartoon with the caption “Carnegie Continues to Promote Simplified Spelling” depicted a female figure holding a dictionary, running and yelling for help while being chased by Carnegie wearing a kilt and holding a spear and a shield labeled “Simplified Spelling,” with removed letters floating away from him.Footnote 111 Callahan used many examples from The American School Board Journal to support his argument that education administrators joined the “cult of efficiency” because of their vulnerability to public pressure.Footnote 112 The journal's devotion to efficiency, coupled with its coolness toward simplified spelling, suggests that this vulnerability played a decisive role in turning educational leaders, like schoolteachers, away from spelling reform.
Over time, many supporters of spelling reform in the education establishment began to qualify their advocacy, echoing teachers’ sentiments that they needed to be mindful of public opinion on the subject. In the Michigan STA's 1878 discussion, a professor remarked, “I think the opposition to this simplification of spelling will come mostly from the more learned classes … the schools cannot or dare not take the lead.”Footnote 113 A decade and a half later, Harris's opening remarks in the Bureau of Education Circular on spelling reform suggested that reformers exercise moderation in deference to “local self-government,” stating that reform occurs through “a gradual process of growth.”Footnote 114 After the turn of the century, such concerns became louder, tempering the establishment's support for simplified spelling, even among its most ardent supporters. In a rather heated discussion in 1901 that led to the Department of Superintendence tabling two motions on simplified spelling, Harris presented a lengthy argument for gradualism, and in the process likely turned the tide against more aggressive action by the NEA. He established his credentials by recounting his use of shorthand and involvement in the movement. “I do not hesitate to repeat on all occasions that I am, and have been, a believer in the desirability of effecting reform in the spelling of English. But,” he added, “I do not believe that this can be done by … this association.” He explained further, “The unreasonable conservatism which widely prevails among the opponents of spelling reform can be undermined only by a gradual process.” He then explained that he had viewed the adoption of the twelve “NEA spellings” as a “wise measure” only until it became public: “This is a case where a thin wedge is needed, and where it is wisest to make as little agitation as possible.” He explained that he opposed the current resolution because “we must not forget, any of us, that this is a National Educational Association, and that spelling reform, or temperance reform, or religious reform, is not the special object of this association.” He then stated, “I am not in favor even of the thin wedge which we adopted two years ago, if that is to be a cause of new struggles and ever-recurring discussions on the subject.” After stating that teachers could not institute reform without permission of the school committee, he added that the school committee could not do it “without the countenance and support of the entire English-speaking people.” Harris did not express opposition to efficiency and stressed that he supported simplified spelling, but he explained that to him the cause was not worth risking the NEA's reputation.Footnote 115
Ardent crusader Vaile decried Harris's “Vengeance-is-mine-saith-the-Lord intimidation,” but subsequent actions, or lack thereof, by public education leaders suggest that concerns about negative public reactions overrode Vaile's pleas. Even he later acknowledged that school boards were hamstrung in reforming spelling because they were beholden to the community. Desiring to avoid scrutiny, the NEA simplified-spelling committee's suggestion to the Department of Superintendence in 1905 was remarkably cautious: “The time seems ripe for a discreet, systematic, quiet, and thoroughgoing effort, on a business basis, to disseminate accurate knowledge in regard to English spelling and promote its simplification. This effort must be more or less of an experiment, of course.”Footnote 116 Understanding this need for discretion, spelling reformers accepted Ella Flagg Young's reluctance to take a public stand after she became superintendent of Chicago schools in 1909. Although she had supported reform in earlier NEA and Illinois STA discussions, and the movement was eager to enlist such a prominent woman, the secretary of the SSB acknowledged that she would be unable to help “now [that] she has undertaken to fight with the beasts at Ephesus.”Footnote 117 Seerley wrote to Felmley that Young and another potential recruit “do not wish to load themselves up with any likelihood of criticism from those who find fault with such a movement.”Footnote 118 Young's position was simply too vulnerable, as was that of the school superintendent in Keokuk, Iowa, who wrote to Seerley for advice on how to rein in a school board member's enthusiasm for spelling reform. The superintendent wrote, “I am certainly in favor of simplified spelling but … all the daily press would be against us, as well as a great deal of public prejudice.”Footnote 119
The Keokuk superintendent must have found a sympathetic audience, as Seerley echoed Harris in calling for gradualism and moderation in the public education establishment, even as he participated enthusiastically in the SSB. He wrote in The Iowa Normal Monthly in 1906 that reform could “wait until the spirit is more inclined to accept a change,” emphasizing, “Common Sense is Necessary” and “Abuse and Recklessness Must Be Avoided.”Footnote 120 Two years later, Seerley cautioned the SSB that “leaders in public education … are unable to be charlatans or faddists because they continually give an account for their stewardship … their influence and efficiency depend entirely upon their personal acceptability.” He explained that while education leaders, like teachers, supported simplified spelling, “these men and women are not able to count largely in advancing reform. They are servants of the public, not the dictators of policies to be followed; they are guides controlled by authority and custom rather than originators of plans and the creators of changes. … It can never be forgotten that public opinion is a potent factor.”Footnote 121 In his own approach to promoting reform, Seerley tried to be ever-mindful of the potency of public opinion, writing to the SSB secretary, “I am working away quietly and moderately to develop a permanent interest in this state. My method may not be the most public, but I hope it will bring the results.”Footnote 122 Knowing that such an approach fell short of Vaile's standards, he wrote to him, “I hope you will not be disappointed in me too much because I look at the question from the administrativ point of view rather than from a promoter's point of view.” Seerley's “administrativ” approach tempered his advocacy of spelling reform in hopes of avoiding scrutiny.Footnote 123
Despite his carefulness, in 1911 Seerley received very public criticism when members of the Iowa legislature attacked the State Teachers College after it used simplified spelling in its publications. He defended himself to the legislature and the state board of education, even writing to the SSB secretary that “the airing of the question” called attention to “the shorter spellings,” but college publications soon reverted to traditional spelling.Footnote 124 Finally, in 1920, Seerley replied to a journal editor's question about spelling reform, “I am indifferent, now adays concerning propaganda on this question … the cause will take a long time to be won in full but that is left to those who follow.”Footnote 125 After years of qualifying his advocacy in deference to public opinion, Seerley lost his resolve. More than antimodernism and opposition to efficiency itself, the vulnerability that Seerley and other leaders shared with the schoolteachers undermined their support for spelling reform. Thus, the force that Callahan argues had attracted educators to efficiency also caused them to turn away from one particular strand of efficiency. Vulnerability to public criticism engendered both teacher resistance, which obstructed spelling reform, and the education establishment's capitulation, which ultimately derailed the movement for simplified spelling.
Conclusion
In 1921, the NEA officially withdrew its endorsement of simplified spelling.Footnote 126 The public education establishment's organizations and publications had served as platforms for discussion and limited action as supporters of spelling reform argued that it would both save time and money in schooling and create more space in the curriculum for the humanities and child-centered learning. But lack of support from schoolteachers and the weight of public scrutiny progressively undermined these arguments so that the 1921 vote was a mere formality. When criticism of simplified spelling was at its height in 1906, an article in The Iowa Normal Monthly reported that Carnegie had become “a convert to the spelling reform cult.”Footnote 127 Despite the enthusiasm of their leaders, actors in the public education sector never completely converted; even Harris and Seerley carefully weighed the benefits of reform against their vulnerability to public pressure.
Examining the course of simplified spelling within the public education sector deepens historical understanding of education and efficiency during the Progressive Era. Historians have generally portrayed administrators’ embrace of efficiency as a “success story” in which the establishment, motivated by hubris and elitism, imposed a stratified system and a hierarchical command structure on reluctant citizens and teachers.Footnote 128 It certainly took a great deal of hubris for would-be reformers to believe that they could overhaul a language system that had evolved over centuries, yet the story of the spelling reform movement reveals degrees of egalitarianism and deference within the education establishment. Arguments for simplified spelling easily infused social justice into social efficiency and efficiency into child-centered pedagogy. Although this particular egalitarian vision did not come to fruition, the establishment's embrace of it suggests that there was room for social justice within their efficiency agenda. Educators’ ultimate abandonment of spelling reform was not a rejection of the efficiency mantra, but instead underscored the power of teachers’ quiet opposition and public opinion in shaping their actions. The establishment's bow to teacher resistance and public censure demonstrates that it could defer—however reluctantly—to others who had a stake in the system. Finally, and more broadly, the public education establishment's role in sustaining, and ultimately abandoning, the simplified spelling movement serves as a reminder that historians must give full consideration to complexities within the education sector as they refine the history of efficiency's failures as well as successes in the Progressive Era.
